Well… the offer is only available to those who have one of the sword necklaces that Scott made available at conventions and through the site here a while back. Unfortunately I’m not one of them.

THOSE necklaces act very much like the Bahta Alikchi and the bracelet thing that’s supposedly trapped between worlds with Arthur. 😀
Err… maybe not. But it’d be cool!

(Arthur wakes up somewhere in England and gets out of wherever Merlin stashed him years ago, then travels to America to find the new king of Dreamland, carrying with him the finally-completed bracelet. That’d be cool too.)

it WOULD be super cool if there could be a draw like that and Scott can draw a cartoon version of the winner hanging out in dreamland/camelot/university (depending on character) with one of the characters =3 If I remember correctly, Scott is pretty good at drawing and sometimes offer to draw on the items that people buy from him~ i personally am no artist though so i don’t know how difficult it is for Scott, especially with the movie stuff taking up so much time… but just imagining that it’d be really cool~ =3

Hmm. Now, I wonder why Arthur needed to be kept close to the sword. And what would happen if (or has happened since) the sword was removed from being near him? Since Nic seemed disinclined at that point in time to move the sword to his own accomodations, I wonder what that meant. Surely there was a purpose for leaving it there. Perhaps he thought it safe from all others who might use it? Way to weave us a mystery, Scott! Keep it up!

Perhaps the ruler needs to be close to the sword and as long as he is the next in line won’t enter Dreamland, causing havoc. The dragon uses this to his advantage and leaves Arthur trapped in limbo near the sword to make sure no more kings will enter.
I have more but I’m afraid that I might be spot on and ruin a great deal of the storyline.

just thinking aloud here.. if the sword is with Arthur and the next in line wouldn’t be able to enter dreamland, We are saying that because Alex got the sword he became the next in line.. but in reality his brother Daniel cant come go to dreamland. This im guessing suggesting that Daniel was the next in line after Arthur.
well that’s an interesting development.

I personally think that it is because of one reason. Merlin told Arthur to not have the sword on him when they began the spell to make the bracelet. The sword has to be kept near Arthur because if its not, then it may just return and pull the original Excalibur myth up and perpetuate that. The sword in the stone that can only be removed by the king of England. Last I checked England doesn’t have any noteworthy kings since Henry VIII, who had 7 wives at one point, but that may not be accurate, any one from England feel free to prove me wrong. By the way, has any one else noticed that Arthur is wearing the almost exact same armor as Alex? The armor he got from the Elves who said it had been waiting in a hidden compartment for the next true king of Dreamland? The one that hadn’t been moved since Arthur apparently went in to limbo between the two worlds?

Hmmm…interesting that Nic would only be interested in casting a spell to keep Dreamlanders out of the tomb. Shouldn’t he be more concerned about human folk? Or were children not appearing randomly in Dreamland yet? I mean…we haven’t seen any children there in Arthur’s time.

OoooO!!! Maybe that’s the side effect of the bracelet being trapped between worlds? Ah?? 🙂 I could just be wildly speculating in an attempt to make my boring day at work more interesting…

I wonder if when Alex removed the sword, it severed Arthur’s connection with Dreamland (since it appears the sword necklace is the only link to Dreamland for adults), which broke his limbo, and allowed Arthur to finally pass away (seeing as old age might have caught up to him at this point). After all, the sword states that Arthur is dead, which is why Alex is king, and it appears that this had to happen during Alex’s lifetime. If this is the case it could be that Nic knew this, and thus wanted to keep the sword close to Arthur so that he would be trapped.

Hmm… the sword doesn’t explicitly state that Arthur is DEAD, just that he is GONE. (pp. 1043)
By birthright, DANIEL would be King… but due to Arthur being trapped, that was made impossible. The law of cosmic loopholes found a way around that, when one eligible for Kingship found the Tomb of King’s and drew the sword. The implication is that Arthur is probably dead – and this is what Nicodemus’ assumption is as well in those pages – but that hasn’t been confirmed for certain yet unless I’ve missed something.

Arthur’s death – as you said – would have to occur some time AFTER he drew the sword from the dais and was chased from Dreamland by Nicodemus those years earlier… These recent pages show that Nicodemus knows the sword needed to be near Arthur, yet he shows surprise that a new King has been chosen.

If the sword chooses whom it obeys, then it chose to obey AND protect Alexander WAAAY back in Chapter 1 😀

Currently the unanswered question in my mind is will Arthur wake up if the sword is not near him… and what are the consequences of that? Was he placed in a protective spell of sorts to await a day that he WOULD wake, was his body laid to rest as though he were already dead? What of Avalon?

I am thinking that possibly his real world body, severed from his “being,” would die. Maybe some sort of spell could put it into stasis, but without a way to reconnect Arthur to his body, it would be pointless.

As for the sword, I think that this is a trick of Nic’s. That by separating the sword from Arthur long enough, the sword might automatically reset to a new king of Dreamland or something. So by binding them together, he locks the system up as it were.

The sword is removed by Alex. Some time later, this removal breaks the magic preserving and holding Arthur; his ancient waking-world body passes immediately to dust. The magical backlash from this throws Arthur’s Dreamworld self back in Dreamworld time, where as a disembodied spirit he becomes a Wraith. Being a natural ruler, he eventually rises to ascendancy in the Nightmare Realm, and changes his name to Abaddon.
Thus he becomes, in an entirely different sense, his own worst enemy …

I disagree… I think Nic is paying last respects to a man he respected and rather liked, as to his own admission.

He stated that he actually liked Arthur, but did what he had to do to preserve Dreamland.
He’s going to have Arthur buried near the sword out of respect for the man, not out of any particular additional malevolence.

Love the story, I can’t wait to see what is going to happen next. Will Arthur return? Will Alex get the bracelet to bring his brother to Dreamland?
Shouldn’t Nic say that he is going to “cast a spell” or perhaps “use a spell”? Maybe it is just me, but the sentence doesn’t seem to work as it is.

As for Arthur’s death, the legend of “The once and future king” is that Arthur is sleeping (with his knights) until Briton is again threatened, when he will rise from sleep and go to war again as he did so well long ago.

Unfortunately, nowadays his foes, the Angles and Saxons, are running the place.

Avalon is where he is located at in a sort of stasis according to the myth, and England, some times called Great Brittian, has been threatened several times in the past few years, granted it wasn’t any thing nationally threatening but Arthur was a king who ruled thanks to the people and so he tried to protect them when he could. He rarely went to war when peace was an option, and so he won the respect of his enemies, and allies. He also earned much respect from his knights for not being foolish and wasting the lives of his people in pointless bloodshed. In fact I think he only actually went to war a handful of times in the original myth, and the most notable was covered in the Morte de Arthur (or how ever it was spelled), where he “was gravely wounded” and his body was sent to Avalon by the last two knights, who I can not remember there names for the life of me, in a boat that the “lady of the lake” brought to shore near the final battle. The sword was just tossed in after him once his boat had set sail and the “lady of the lake” caught it and took it to rest with him. Over analyzing FTW

Also, Nic is referencing the great mason wars between the gnomes and dwarves over who would resize the existing throne – for his draconic buttocks is far too large to sit comfortably on a throne built for humans unless he wants it to be a suppository. XD

Or maybe just a representation of the Devil. Just like someone might have a nightmare about the Yankees. That might mean that a nightmare version of the Yankees would come to exist but it wouldn’t mean that it was the Yankees.
The Devil might also have never existed and it could just be a misinterpretation by men haunted by terrible nightmares.

The amulet they were forging probaly is somehow conncted to the sword/necklece, otherwise Alex wouldn’t e able to get to the Dreamland as adult, which probaly means that the process is finished and Arthur is no longer traped, which might explain how Alex got to be the king

Now, I know I’ve been an anti-Nic sort from the beginning of this explanatory side story but this pretty much vindicates my viewpoint. In a very very short time, Nic went from reluctant traitor trying to help Dreamland to indifferently accepting the need to use thugs from Nightmare to crush dissent.
I mean no disrespect to Mr. Sava, but this badly sabotages his openly-stated intent to make Nic into a villian who got to hell by good intentions. It breaks suspension of disbelief to accept that someone who is so quick to accept help from shifty characters (at best) to beat his people down genuinely cares for their well-being and had good intentions in betraying the rightful king. It also breaks suspension of disbelief to accept that Nicodemus regards war and an alliance with Nightmare to retain power by suppression as better than a flawed but good man coming into posession of an artifact that allows more than one adult human to visit Dreamland at a time.

Gotta agree. I feel that Nicodemus’ sudden switch here from ‘this wasn’t my intention, it’s a shame it had to come to this’ to ‘welp, looks like I’m the new king of Dreamland!’ in the space of a page is extremely jarring. His behaviour throughout the comic has been so utterly dastardly that he just doesn’t seem believable as a formerly heroic character, or as somebody who genuinely feels he’s doing the best for his world. If he was benevolent towards children, or to the other denizens of Dreamland outside of humans, or at least regretted his alliance with the Nightmare Realm and inability to keep them under control, it’d be more convincing.
To me, at no point has Nicodemus ever come across as more than a guy who’s out for himself using ‘protecting dreamland’ as an excuse. If this was the intention for his character, that he’s a hypocritical and delusional guy who was never really good to begin with, then it works, but I can’t believe in him as ever having sincerely believed in what he says because all of his actions contradict his words, and he switched to the bad guys at the first sign of anything difficult to resolve.

Problem is we are only getting snapshots of what happened. This mini-arc has taken place over years if not decades and unfortunately was not our first introduction to Nic.

Merlin advised Arthur that Nic was loyal to Dreamland first and Arthur second. Nic warned Arthur as to the consequences, Arthur seemed to relent and then promptly left Nic in the dark. The nightmare fiends brought Nic intel that Arthur was still working towards bringing others to Dreamland, Nic sees this as Arthur betraying Dreamland, and did what he felt was necessary to protect Dreamland.

Notice he didn’t kill Arthur only tried to kill those helping him. He knows that if he stood against Arthur openly it would split Dreamland and if his role in Arthur’s disappearance was made public he would have open revolt on his hands. Something that seems to have happened anyway. If Nic wanted the throne we would killed Arthur long before now. He is just doing what he must to protect that which he loves,

The flashback showed us how the evolution of Nic, and why things are as they are now. It gave us some answers, but also raised new questions. There is still so much to do in the present time that needs our attention. So, it might not be your desire, but now that you’re at it, meh… let’s get cracking.

So … was that by lineage, or what? How was it that Dan was the one destined to be king, and his twin brother Alex just happened to be the one to find the sword as a kid? I feel like there’s a connection somewhere I’m missing.

I don’t think the method for choosing kings was ever clearly defined. Some are related but I’m guessing that for others it is just being worthy of rule. It could be a distant relation to Arthur that placed Dan as first in line and his younger brother as an acceptable second.

So the plot thickens. It seems that Nicodemus’ evil tendencies are more habit than nature…eight hundred years of habit. Even if he does turn out to be a good guy it seems like he’s caught between a rock and a hard place.

Nicodemus: “I fear that war was beginning. I must set up us the bomb.”

Nic certainly isn’t the 2D creature he first seemed to be – Just like real people 🙂
I never have problems with small jumps and inconsistencies in stories. After all, who remembers a part of their past accurately and in full detail?

Moving aside how Dreamland was BEFORE all this happened, it would seem that the gray areas Nic once said there are in dreamland started coming right after this. Funny thing, just how trying to avoid Dreamland becoming a world similar to the human world, he achieved just that. If he could see how fool he was, how fool he is, what he has become, what he has made of Dreamland… Oh, well, we shall see I guess.

We might not know if Arthur was right, but at least there’s enough proof that Nicodemus’ system IS worse than what was before.

Hmm…it occurs to me Nic is one of those villains that truly believes his way is right…he doesn’t think he’s being evil…he thinks he’s doing this for the good of Dreamland…at least at this point in the history…